Monday, June 04, 2007

After years of consideration and speculation, it appears that grocery store giant Wegmans is officially coming to Columbia.

A crack tipster alerted me to the fact that the mega-grocer has submitted a site development plan for the piece of property at the intersection of McGaw Road and Snowden River Parkway (across from Apple Ford and currently home to the warehouse where The Wire is filmed).

This move has been a topic of news stories and blog posts for a while, but nothing concrete has ever been put forth until now.

Yet unknown is the impact the new store will have on Columbia's village centers, many of which rely on anchor grocery stores to bring in customers.

Even after all these years of discussion, I still don't think I have a strong sense of the Wegmans ripple effect. Certainly, many people from all over Howard County (and other counties) will choose to shop there, but how often? Enough to seriously hurt the village center grocers?

What about the new Harris Teeter coming to Kings Contrivance? Though not as big as Wegmans, it appeals to a similar demographic and will likely also generate traffic from a wider area than just its village.

Let's assume Wegmans becomes the grocery store of choice for enough people that the village center grocery stores start to suffer and, eventually, close. What happens then? How do we ensure our village centers can stay solvent? Obviously, villages have dealt with or are dealing with grocery-store-loss, but it seems to me the thinking done in these instances was based on the idea that a grocery store would always be a component of the village centers. Perhaps we need to adjust that assumption.